Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties - Softcover

Rowbotham, Sheila

3.73

79 ratings by Goodreads

9781859844007: Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1859844006 ISBN 13: 9781859844007

Publisher: Verso Books, 2002

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Promise of a Dream is a moving, witty and poignant recollection of a time when young women were breaking all the rules about sex, politics and their place in the world. Sheila Rowbotham, best known for A Century of Women, Threads Through Time and Hidden From History, turns her hand here to memoir. The result is a wryly amusing account of her younger self, and a sparkling portrait of the exhilaration and enthusiasm of the sixties.

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Review:

Sheila Rowbotham is a social and intellectual historian of the first rank, as those familiar with her two recent publications--A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States and the collection of essays Threads Through Time--will know. Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties recounts the story of Rowbotham's political radicalisation and the questioning of what it meant to be a woman long before Women's Liberation surfaced as a movement.

Rowbotham's first excursion into the memoir business sharply contrasts with the "theorising" of one's experience, which has become common fare amongst the academic left and of multi-denominational feminism in recent years, because this is also a funny, eventful and often poignant personal story. Whether speaking of the death of her mother, the quick-witted rape escape, the value of mascara for ginger eyelashes or telling stories of love and sex, she rarely strikes a false sentimental or sensational note. Virginia Woolf once said of public writing and speaking that "One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold ... one can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker." This is the way Rowbotham goes about her task and one of the reasons why the result is so reader-friendly, as she describes, "by describing how I thought as I thought and did what I did in personal terms, I hope to bring some of the dreams of the 60s back into view."

What has been lost from view, for Rowbotham, is the knowledge that the women's liberation approach to politics was rooted in the ideas and assumptions of the social movements of the 1960s--in particular the American New Left. "Over time people forgot their origins and they were called in a political shorthand simply the 'feminist' way of organising." In short, the connections between ideas and movements has been buried. Those students short on intellectual history but enchanted by cultural studies, French philosophers or feminist theory in its various guises need this more than they realise. To get the most out of this book read it alongside Threads Through Time. --Larry Brown

Review:

"A record of an era, winding one girl's coming-of-age story through the drama of political evolution ... She has captured that amazing sense of possibility that grew with each year, the confidence that not only was the promised dream within reach, it was also upon us."--Mary Maher, "Irish Times""This is a document historians dream of ... it captures the spirit of the 1960s--its fun and crazy idealism--in the life of one spirited young woman."--Joan Bakewell, "Sunday Times""Unerringly perceptive and funny ... if you want to know what the sixties were like, read this book."--Julie Christie"The book works best in conveying the excitement generated by ideas, not just straightforwardly political ones but those about art and the wider definition of liberation ... I wasn't there, but I'm happy that Rowbotham was, and that she remembers it with such clarity."--"Literary Review""The accounts of the successes, failures, joys and pains of young adulthood have the qualities to be found in the best creative writing. It is a book to be read for the quality of its writing and the honesty and humor of its presentation, as much as for the history it reveals."--Dorothy Thompson, "Times Higher Education SUpplement""Rowbotham records ... hearing an American use the expression 'male chauvinism' in 1967 and asking what it meant. It meant exactly what she and other women on the Left had suffered from for years--being ignored. If they spoke at meetings, the men would pause as if for a plane passing overhead, and then resume the discussion."--Lynn Barber, "The Daily Telegraph""The accounts of the successes, failures, joys and pains of young adulthood have the qualities to be found in the best creative writing. It is a book to be read for the quality of its writing and the honesty and humor of its presentation, as much as for the history it reveals."--Dorothy Thompson, "The Times Higher Education Supplement"

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